Tall, dark, and handsome (not to mention muscular) John Payne (1912-1989) first became a popular leading man in Fox musicals of the first half of the 1940s, alternating romancing Alice Faye, Betty Grable, and Sonja Henie.  He occasionally assisted them musically but primarily was on hand to provide sturdy masculine support.  That was Payne in pictures like Sun Valley Serenade (1941), Springtime in the Rockies (1942), and Hello Frisco, Hello (1943), with the locations changing but the plots virtually interchangeable.

About mid-decade, several musical or light-comic male stars reinvented themselves successfully for the looming post-war era:  easygoing Fred MacMurray turned to greed, lust, and murder in Double Indemnity (1944); crooner Dick Powell became detective Philip Marlowe for Murder, My Sweet (1945); and debonair Ray Milland drank his way to an Oscar in The Lost Weekend (1945).  Payne’s career followed a similar arc but his transition didn’t get the attention afforded the aforementioned fellows.  Perhaps this is because Payne’s most enduring film remains Miracle on 34th Street (1947), but the reason is more likely that the tough, bitter John Payne of the 1950s, a bona fide film-noir star, never starred in a dark, cynical film that was widely embraced by the public or noticed by the Academy.  Without a Double Indemnity or a Murder, My Sweet, Payne worked seemingly under the radar.  But that doesn’t mean that all of his ’50s pictures were negligible.

One of Payne’s two best films of the 195os is director Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential (Payne’s other standout is his 1954 western Silver Lode).  With consistently ingenious plotting, Kansas City Confidential is a special, unusual film noir, beginning with the fact that, despite its title, it’s primarily set below the border.  The central event is a Kansas City bank robbery, but the main thrust of the drama is the crime’s aftermath.

Payne, as an Iwo Jima veteran and an ex-con (who was framed), is now employed making deliveries for a florist.  Preston Foster is “Mr. Big,” the robbery’s mastermind.  Foster brings together three hoods to implement the robbery, and he masks them so that they never see each other’s faces.  And what a trio he comes up with:  Jack Elam, Neville Brand, and Lee Van Cleef.  They seem hand-picked from film-noir heaven (or hell).  Framed for the robbery (a florist’s truck was the getaway car) but then cleared, a seething Payne vows to find the men who wronged him.  A tip leads him to Mr. Elam in Mexico.  When Elam is shot dead by cops, Payne assumes his identity and accelerates the search.  During a later (and terrific) fight scene, in which Brand and Van Cleef beat up Payne, it’s Payne who clearly kicks Brand in the groin.  Is this Hollywood’s first groin kick?

What follows is clever and twisty, brutal and driven, all highly entertaining and sumptuously photographed (with an especially magnificent use of close-ups).  Payne, whose chiseled face was becoming nicely worn (while his body was still fit enough to show off in a bathing suit), is properly intense and single-minded, impressively sustaining his anger without becoming monotonous.  It helps that he’s distracted by Coleen Gray as Foster’s law-student daughter.

Kansas City Confidential is a film-noir beauty, and it stars a Payne so bruised and world-weary that he couldn’t possibly be the guy who was once innocent enough to have spent an impossibly Technicolored weekend on a soundstage Havana with Miss Alice Faye.  He may have lost the tuxedo, but, really, it’s the same guy.